Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1)

by Tahereh Mafi

Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too.

His lips soften into a smile. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him. In 17 years no one has said my name like that.

The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

I wish I could stuff my mouth full of raindrops and fill my pockets full of snow. I wish I could trace the veins in a fallen leaf and feel the wind pinch my nose.

Truth is a jealous, vicious mistress that never ever sleeps, is what I don’t tell him. I’ll never be okay.

I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

Hate looks just like everybody else until it smiles. Until it spins around and lies with lips and teeth carved into the semblance of something too passive to punch.

I begin to wonder if it’s coincidence that the one person most unafraid to touch me is a monster himself.

he’s holding me the way no one has ever held me before. Like he wants me.

A tattoo. A white bird with streaks of gold like a crown atop its head. It’s flying.

Yooo how did she already imagine this??

My body is a carnivorous flower, a poisonous houseplant, a loaded gun with a million triggers and he’s more than ready to fire.

Hope is hugging me, holding me in its arms, wiping away my tears and telling me that today and tomorrow and two days from now I will be just fine and I’m so delirious I actually dare to believe it.

I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I’ve been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind.

“You’re absolutely delicious when you’re angry.”

I need you to relinquish your hopes of living like everyone else. You are not normal. You never have been, and you never will be. Embrace who you are.”

You don’t know it yet, Juliette, but you are a very bad girl,” he says, clutching his heart. “Just my type.”

I wondered if your eye color meant you saw the world differently. If the world saw you differently as a result.

“You have no idea how much I’ve thought about you. How many times I’ve dreamt”—he takes a tight breath—“how many times I’ve dreamt about being this close to you.” He moves to run a hand through his hair before he changes his mind. Looks down. Looks up. “God, Juliette, I’d follow you anywhere. You’re the only good thing left in this world.”

“If any of you hurt her I will shoot you myself,” Warner barks.

This is crazy how obsessed he is

I take a deep breath and hope Warner doesn’t realize what just happened. I hope he doesn’t know he just touched my leg. And nothing happened.

It was really too easy to overpower him. It worries me. It makes me think we did something wrong.

“One of the reasons why Warner wanted me collecting these samples? You’re immune to it, too. He was studying you. He said he found the information in your hospital records. That you’d been tested—” “But no one ever—” “—probably without your knowledge, and despite testing positive for the radiation, you were entirely whole, biologically. There was nothing inherently wrong with you.”

Okay so maybe this is why he can touch her?

“Laughter comes from living.” I shrug, try to sound indifferent. “I’ve never really been alive before.”

I wish he would say something to Kenji—I wish he would tell him that we’re together officially, exclusively. But he doesn’t. And I don’t know why.

“Don’t go,” he says. “Your touch is the only thing keeping me from losing my mind.”

If it were nothing but sexual attraction I’m sure I would not suffer such unbearable humiliation. But I wanted so much more than her body.

I am now wholly dependent on whatever will carry me through these next weeks of frustration. Medicine, medics, hours in bed. All this for a kiss. It’s almost unbearable.

She’s found the cracks in this cast I’m forced to wear every day, and it petrifies me. That this girl would know exactly how to shatter me.

This girl is destroying me. A girl who has spent the last year in an insane asylum. A girl who would try to shoot me dead for kissing her. A girl who ran off with another man just to get away from me. Of course this is the girl I would fall for.